“OBAMA is HITLERIAN in his course, and he is closing in VERY FAST to eliminate totally our liberty rights and heritage,” warned Bean, the granddaughter and heiress to the legendary L.L. Bean, in a recent letter to her fellow Mainers.

Not just any Mainers, mind you. This ear-splitting alarm was aimed specifically at Maine Republicans who still think Republican Congressman Ron Paul should be our next president.

Bean’s point: Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate that Maine’s insurgent libertarians love to hate, ain’t so bad when compared to the sitting president of the United States. Also known, at least to Bean, as a modern-day Adolf Hitler.

Lace up your Bean boots and watch where you step, folks. We’re going back to Crazytown.

Bean’s recent letter is actually a farewell to her fellow Paul supporters, who took control of the Maine Republican Party earlier this year only to have the floor credentials pulled out from under half of their delegates at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. (Delegate Bean survived the purge.)

Bean’s point – and I’m being kind here – is that the time has come for the never-say-die Paulists to stop being so freedom-and-libertyish and do what they once considered unthinkable: Vote for Mitt Romney on Nov. 6.

Her rationale is simple. By keeping their backs turned on Romney — either by voting for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, writing in Ron Paul or just staying home on Election Day — the restive libertarian wing of Maine’s Republican Party will only make it easier for Obama to win re-election.

And that’s just … well, let’s let Bean speak for herself …

“My late husband Verne Jones was born on a Maine farm on the Jones Road in Windsor and worked it his whole life, his grandfather Cunningham before him,” writes Bean. “Before he died in 1985, he asked me to never let it grow back to woods, and my sons and I never have.”

So far so good. Bean goes on to explain that the land is now used by a neighboring dairy farmer, “hardworking Danny Tibbetts who has 168 cows and grows his hay and corn here to feed them.”

As the signs outside her restaurants say, Linda Bean’s Perfect Maine.

Cue the distant thunder …

“Do I want OBAMA to take that away from him?” Bean continues. “NO!”

Obama? Maine dairy farms? Do the cows know about this?

“The government must NOT take into its bureaucratic fiefdom our food land — the most basic means of production of a free people,” Bean warns.

Pan to the root crops …

“Washington bureaucrats and cronies do not know how to ride a tractor or pull a carrot! Their ‘carrot concept’ is to dangle ‘carrots’ in front of inadequately educated people to put more of America on welfare, saying we will be a stronger, healthier nation for doing so.”

Funny, but I’ll never forget a quote that ran in this newspaper back in 1992, when Bean was running unsuccessfully for Maine’s 1st District congressional seat.

Bean recalled how, as a single mother of three who had yet to receive her slice of the family fortune, she benefited from a federal surplus food program — cheese, butter, peanut butter, that sort of thing.

“Welfare was something I tried to avoid,” she said at the time. “But obviously I had to feed my kids.”

Obviously. And what a difference a $7 million inheritance makes.

But back to Obama.

Bean warns her onetime allies in the fight against tyranny that it’s pure folly to assume they’ll have another chance to elect Ron Paul, or maybe his son, Rand, four years from now.

If Obama is re-elected, she writes, “America as we know it may well be gone in four years.”

How so?

“We are on the precipice of losing our country!” laments Bean. “4 years from now we may not even have a ballot.”

Now many will rightfully dismiss all of this as the ranting of a woman who needs to spend a little less time standing over those steaming lobster pots.

But Bean is also a woman who lately has been putting her considerable money where her politics are — witness the $10,830 she’s poured into her Maine-based Defense of Liberty PAC to help more than a dozen (and counting) Republicans who are running for the Maine Legislature.

And she’s a successful businesswomen with more than a few customers who would gag on their “perfect” Maine lobster rolls if they knew the woman behind the famous surname uses words like “HITLERIAN” to describe the nation’s president.

Yeah, I know. All those nasty, hateful liberals called former President George W. Bush all kinds of over-the-top names back when he occupied the Oval Office — and I’ll readily agree that likening any president to Hitler was as repugnant then as it is now.

But this time feels different. As we mercifully enter the final days of this campaign, a current of anger flows through this country that is beyond political.

It’s irrational. It’s dangerous. And it’s rooted, to borrow Bean’s own words, in “inadequately educated” people who hate first and ask questions later — if they ask them at all.

Want to know who Barack Obama really is? Sometime between now and Election Day, check out this YouTube video of a town meeting he did in New Orleans back in 2009.

There, a young African-American boy named Terrence Scott took the microphone, looked his president in the eye and asked, “Why do people hate you?“

Replied Obama, “If you are watching TV lately, it seems like everybody’s getting mad all the time.”

But, he assured the wide-eyed fourth-grader, “You shouldn’t take it too seriously.”

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